Zoom out. Remember all the technologies that have been backed into wrong-way-first. Future humans, leave aside aliens, will be unable to distinguish between t

Zoom out. Remember all the technologies that have been backed into wrong-way-first. Future humans, leave aside aliens, will be unable to distinguish between the engineering drawings of anything that has moving parts and the cartoons of Rube Goldberg. Remember Haldane (the quote is also attributed to Jeans, Hoyle, Eddington, and various others): "The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." (The one thing that they will have, even if to their distaste, is powers of 2.) ETA: If Turing was trying to make a distinction between the finiteness of the symbol for (say) the square root of three, versus the infinitude of the process that must be executed to evaluate it, that would be not so much disreputable as nonsensical. He was fond of setting up straw men; let us suppose that this was one of them.